Devon and Cornwall Police Blocked From Web Porn and Gambling 2,700 Times in Three Months

Bobbies out on the, ahem, beat, in Devon and Cornwall have been caught trying to access pornographic and gambling related materials from force computers more than 2,700 times over the past three months. Pop-up adverts from "legitimate" websites were to blame say police officials. Yeah, like we haven't heard that one before...

The stats come courtesy of a Freedom of Information Act request, which revealed that roughly 700 "pornographic" pages had been filtered by the police force's web systems, and that around 2,000 gambling sites had similarly been blocked.

In the defence of the apparently-chaste coppers, Deputy Chief Constable David Zinzan stated that an incredibly strict filtering system saw everything from news websites to dating pages sometimes fall under the "pornographic" filtering category. However, a "tiny percentage" of the 6,000-strong force have been disciplined.

Still, it pales in comparison to the randy politicians over at the Houses of Parliament -- they were revealed to have made more than 300,000 attempts to view pornographic content from Parliament computers over the course of a year. That's a hell of a lot of "legitimate website pop-ups". [BBC]